Those who don't understand UNIX are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.

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On being Freelance and castles in the sky

This week it dawned on me how much potential I wasted before becoming self-employed. Over the years there was countless times where I just slammed my head into the desk because bosses or workmates wouldn’t understand some far-fetched thing I came up with.

Basically, any time I’m working on something, my head will consider and spin around ideas for improving it. And improving the improved version. And the one after that. And then suddenly I see the castle in the air… The one that will do away with most of the issues involved with how things are done[tm] and replaces it with something cleaner.

Some people have let me go ahead with and have usually ended up quite happy with the final result, but most of the time they’ll be too busy with the current issues at hand to even grasp that I’m pointing them at a way that _removes_ the issues.

That was a waste of my time.

Another thing I had taken long to understand is actually really easy – other people have other goals, other visions. So if you work for someone, well, it’s obvious now:

You don’t get to chose, you don’t get to design, you don’t get to do the things that prove smarter in the long run. Someone else is chosing for you, and as long as you keep that role, it won’t change.

Design a SAN with iSCSI fronend. After the design $boss cuts out the 2 $300 LAN switches, handing you a leftover 8port D-Link?

Fucking stupid, tell me in the first place and I’ll account for bad equipment, but don’t drop it in AFTER designing. It never works like this!

That’s what I’m talking about. Thats how people force decisions on you, and turn your work into a piece of shit, wasting countless money on the future impacts and crashes of their own platform where they could have had something that would have worked.

I really think in very long terms when it comes to system design and was always puzzled about decisions being made that would hurt the respective decider for years to come.

(Check_MK wise: not using PAXOS for the replication, no proper WATO api, …)

Often I had proposed a more reliable way in the start, to no avail.

Well to cut it short:

I can’t waste time with people that don’t see/share my visions. I rather need to go out and talk to people that understand them. They’re there.

And this is where the one prerequisite comes in:

Evolving to your full potential and making your visions come true requires not being someone else’s employee.